


When I Know What to Ask

by grenadine



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-29
Updated: 2007-03-29
Packaged: 2017-10-21 11:26:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grenadine/pseuds/grenadine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jan, and her impending midlife crisis, go to the bookstore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Know What to Ask

  
  
_and I'll find out the answers  
when I know what to ask  
_   
_{kt tunstall ~ miniature disasters}_

 _  
_  
The sky looks gray outside the window of the Barnes & Noble where Jan sits, idly playing with the handle of her umbrella. The store is mostly quiet this late on a Friday night, and Jan is alone at a table in the corner of the coffee shop, sipping an iced mocha and working her way through a pile of magazines she has no intention of paying for.

It's about as dangerous as she gets, really.

Jan sighs into her straw and flips a page to find a relationship quiz in her current magazine. She winces, but reaches down into her purse for a pen, uncaps it, and fills the quiz out anyway. She's careful to make only the slightest impression, leaving no trail of ink behind. When she's done, she runs her hand down the page and feels the row of tiny, almost invisible, indentations.

She doesn't add up her score. She figures she's had enough pain in her life today, what with the Scranton branch's expense reports taking the entire afternoon and most of the night to untangle. The hotel room she'd been prescient enough to reserve was waiting for her, but Jan had felt the need to be _out_ , although she'd also felt the fleeting need to lie down, clamp a pillow over her face, and scream.

The Scranton branch does that to her sometimes.

Jan glances outside to check if she'd remembered to roll up her car window (yes) and absently twists the band of her watch around. Technically, she's not supposed to be either asleep _or_ at the bookstore. She'd broken the date she'd made with three friends who lived in the area, all of them around her age, successful, and in various stages of divorce proceedings.

She'd gone out with them a few times before and the night always began in about the same way: dinner and drinks, sparkling conversation, aren't we all lucky to be free women in the modern age? Invariably, too, the night ended with the four of them slumped around a rickety table in a convenient bar, chewing over old disgusts and disappointments and knocking back more Cosmopolitans than were really necessary.

Once, there had been karaoke.

She tries not to think about that night too much.

So, in the blue-gray dusk of the parking lot of the Scranton branch, she'd stood with the tips of her fingers on the handle of her car door, and had decided that she didn't really want to wake up the next morning with a raging headache and the urge to go downstairs and take out any lingering feelings of hostility on a punching bag in the hotel gym.

She’d thought, too, as she’d pitched her briefcase into the backseat with one graceless, underhanded gesture, that the bookstore was the only place in Scranton virtually guaranteed not to contain one Michael Gary Scott.

She’d been right about _that_ , of course.

Jan finishes the last of her coffee and looks around, feeling a little bleary-eyed and a little depressed. The smooth jazz piped in over the store's loudspeaker is putting her to sleep despite the caffeine, so she uncrosses her legs and stands up, leaving the magazines for someone else to worry about.

She walks aimlessly through the store, holding her umbrella loosely in one hand and her purse in the other, feeling pleasantly blank. She passes through Fiction and Biography, catches the eyes of an old man in History and two teenage boys in Science Fiction, and browses the coffee table books in Art, when, suddenly, she hears a familiar voice coming from over the divider that separates the children's books from the adult world.

Curious, she goes around the wall, and discovers Toby from the branch office sitting awkwardly on a carpet-covered riser, speaking intently to a golden-haired little girl who must be his daughter. As she moves closer, she can see that Toby is holding two books out to the girl, trying to get her to pick one, and smiling gently at her indecision.

Jan, standing next to a rack of animal puppets and wearing a five thousand dollar suit, suddenly feels terribly out of place.

She half-turns to go, but Toby looks up, and she has to turn back around and say hello to a business acquaintance, at least?

"Hey, Jan," he says, and nods quietly, smiling.

Everything about Toby, thinks Jan, is quiet. Even when he's lecturing Michael, his voice never goes above a certain level, which is...admirable. She's always known him to be a calm, sensible sort of man, but she doesn't really know much about him except that he has this daughter.

And recently, not a wife.

"Hello," she says, "I didn't mean to disturb you, I was just...Well." She shrugs her shoulders and feels awkward, intruding, but Toby's daughter whirls around and flashes her a brilliant, toothy smile. 

She bounces over to Jan and says, "Hi! Do you know my dad?"

"From work, yes, I do." Jan hears her voice go up a register and winces internally. "What's your name?"

"Sasha."

"Sasha," Jan repeats, and sticks out her hand. "I'm Jan. Nice to meet you," and she feels ridiculous, what does she know about children, but Sasha beams and pumps her hand up and down, and before Jan knows it she's being physically dragged over to where Toby has sheepishly risen from the floor.

He says to Jan, by way of explanation, "Sasha gets hyper sometimes when she doesn't feel like sleeping. I take her here to read for a while..." he trails off, and she thinks he might be embarrassed to have her see him here.

She resists the sudden impulse to tell him about Cosmos and squeaking bar stools and women with too much money and not enough of anything else. She thinks he probably already understands. It seems like he might.

He makes an exaggerated sweeping gesture towards a dinky little yellow table and chairs. "Would you, ah, care to sit down?"

She looks at him quizzically. It's the first time she's ever heard anything like a joke from Toby, and she's at a loss to explain it until Sasha beams and giggles. "You're funny, Daddy."

Jan smiles. "Well, if you don't mind," she says, and awkwardly folds herself into a chair made for a five-year-old, setting her purse and umbrella on the floor.

Toby sits on the edge of the table, the back legs of which lift a fraction of an inch off the ground. "We were just trying to find something to read," he says. Sasha nods vigorously and starts collecting stray books and piling them into Jan's lap.

Toby, lowering his voice, asks her, "So, how’d it go today?"

Jan manages to sigh and smile at Toby's industrious daughter at the same time. "I'm going to _kill_...I'm going to do something very, _very_ bad to Michael one of these days."

Toby thinks about that for a second. "Do you...think you might need some help with that?"

Jan snorts. "I'll let you know the place and time."

Sasha holds a book out to her father. "This one?"

"Try for something shorter, sweetie," he says. "You have to sleep eventually."

Sasha pouts, and goes back to her search.

"So, what brings you here tonight?" asks Toby, keeping an eye on his daughter, but actually managing to sound interested in the answer.

Jan shrugs. "I had an appointment I didn’t want to keep."  

Sasha starts rummaging through the books on Jan’s lap. Jan puts out a hand to stop the pile from tilting over and falling onto the floor, as Sasha pulls a book out and waves it in front of Jan’s face.

"Do you like this one?"

"I think that’s an excellent choice," says Jan, achieving temporary picture book equilibrium. She shares a warm glance with Toby, who looks amused and even like...he’s enjoying the company?

There is a not entirely short silence, while Jan considers that. She bites her lower lip. "I..." 

Toby's phone rings.

He swallows. "Sorry, I didn't mean to..."

"No, no," Jan shakes her head. She doesn’t really know what she was going to say in any case.

Toby answers the phone. "Hi, Michael. No, Michael. No, I'm at the bookstore with..." he glances at Jan. She mouths: _I'm not here_ , making Sasha giggle.

Toby recovers, "...my daughter." He listens for a second. "Michael, I can't really take a complaint for something that happens outside of work..." He gets up and covers the phone, glancing apologetically at Jan.

"Can you...?" and he gestures at Sasha.

"Oh! Oh, sure," and she waves a hand.

Sure, she thinks. No problem. Feel free to trust the childless, workaholic divorcée, who should be getting drunk right now, with your only child.

Toby wanders away, and from where Jan is sitting it looks like he's about to hang up when he gets another call. His tone changes, becomes tighter, angrier, and Jan knows he's talking to his ex. She’s pretty familiar with that particular tone. 

She looks away, wishes for a cigarette.

She shifts the pile of books onto the table and stands up, bends to retrieve her umbrella and fish the lighter out of her purse. She quickly thinks better of that idea and sinks down onto the carpet-covered riser with her back against the wall, suddenly very tired.  

As Toby’s call continues, Sasha climbs over her legs, jumps up and down on a chair and chatters at her. Jan attempts to make conversation, but can barely get a word in edgewise:

"My favorite color is green."

"Really? Well..."

"I have a new tricycle!"

"That's..."

"I saw a man with a puppy today!"

"What kind...?"

"Daddy works for a nice man."

Jan smiles, and finally manages a sentence. "I'm glad you think so."

Sasha nods and decides to sit down. She falls silent while contemplating the spine of a book, and Jan feels obligated to continue the conversation.

"Do you..." and she doesn't know why she asks this, "Do you see your dad a lot?"

Sasha nods. "I live half the time with Mommy and half the time with Daddy." She wrinkles her nose, and kicks the toe of her pink sneaker into the carpet.

"Mommy and Daddy fight a lot," she volunteers, almost nonchalantly, and scrambles back up to paw through a pile of picture books.

Jan swallows hard. She was always a bit hesitant about the whole idea, it's not like she never...but her career, and _he’d_ never wanted them, and now...

Well, it was just better for everyone, the way things turned out.

Jan looks at the girl, playing idly with the cover of a copy of _Madeline_ , and feels a sharp stab of pity deep in her chest.  

It takes her a minute to realize that she's not sure who it's for.

Sasha comes over and dumps the book in her lap. "This one."

Jan blinks. "You want me to read to you?" Sasha nods, and plants herself down next to Jan on the riser.

"Well..." Jan looks for Toby, spots him moving down an aisle of books across the section, still on the phone. Her eyes come to rest on Sasha's expectant face.

"Well. All right." She opens the book and begins at the beginning: " _In an old house in Paris, that was covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines..._ "

She isn't exactly sure what she's supposed to be doing, but she seems to be doing it well enough. Sasha listens intently and looks raptly at the pictures.

If only she got this sort of attention from her regional managers.

By rights, at least two of the women she bailed on tonight should probably be doing something like this right now with their own children. Jan sighs, brushes the manicured nail of her thumb against the vacant skin of her ring finger, and turns a page.

Five minutes later, out of the corner of her eye she sees the little blonde head start to droop sideways, but she keeps reading. Almost before she knows it, Sasha is snuggled into her side, fast asleep.

She looks up, and can see Toby at a distance as he continues arguing futilely over the phone. He sticks a hand in his pocket and leans against a bookshelf, raising his eyes to the white plaster ceiling.

Jan blinks once, carefully reaches over and sets the book down on the yellow table, and just as carefully puts an arm around her sleeping charge.

The store is quiet except for the faint music playing through the speakers, and the distant murmur of Toby's voice on the phone.

Jan bends her head, whispers, "It's going to be okay, you know."

The intercom flickers to life in the empty store, announcing fifteen minutes to closing time, but Sasha doesn't stir. Jan quietly rubs her shoulders, keeps whispering: "It's going to be just fine."

She wonders if it’s started raining yet.


End file.
